Game On! Using Interactive Training Games to Spice Up Group Classes and Strengthen Obedience Skills

Want to set yourself apart in the marketplace, bust out of a training rut, and increase client ‘buy in’ to your style? Nicole Skeehan shows you how – and it’s easier than you think! By using these creative training games in your group classes or private lessons, you’ll introduce and reinforce obedience cues and teach dogs how to work through distraction.

The games can stand alone, or Nicole will show you how to combine several into a class that will keep clients engaged and make them beg for more!

Featured games include:

The Dollar Drop

Temptation Tower

Setter Suicide

Rammy Time

and more

Turn your routine on its tail with these stimulating interactive games from one of the industry’s most knowledgeable trainers.

Nicole Skeehan’s professional animal training career began in college, when she taught teaching equestrian and horseback riding lessons at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh. After graduating with a double major in marketing and advertising, she worked at a boarding kennel as head trainer and obedience instructor, where she earned her CPDT-KA certification.

In 2005, Nicole decided to start lending her skills to helping pets in need. Her first experience with animal shelter work was with Animal Friends, a no-kill animal shelter and companion animal resource center in Pittsburgh.

In 2008, The Pennsylvania SPCA in Philadelphia recruited Nicole to be its Director of Animal Behavior and Training. At the SPCA, she built a program to enrich the lives of the animals during their stay in the shelter, and to educate the public in an effort to find permanent homes for shelter animals. In this role, Nicole gained extensive experience working with the most vulnerable populations of animals, including those affected by extreme cruelty and neglect. Nicole’s specialty in this role was retraining and rehabilitating fighting dogs and helping them to acclimate to life as family companions. Nicole continues to work in the field of animal rescue by contracting with shelters to build behavior programming.

Nicole also created behavior programming and served as the Director of Behavior for New Leash on Life-USA, a prison dog training program, working directly with the program’s inmates and their dogs. Nicole’s efforts in animal rescue have been documented on television shows including “Animal Cops: Philadelphia;” Animal Planet’s “Dogfighting Exposed;” and her expertise has been tapped for National Geographic Network’s “What Breed Am I?” and television and radio programming.

Nicole currently owns and operates Philly Unleashed (www.phillyunleashed.com), which provides group and private dog training and behavior modification to the Philadelphia metro area. She is also the co-founder of Tricked Out Training (www.trickedouttraining.com), the complete educational resource for dog trainers and behavior enthusiasts. In 2013, Nicole was elected to the Board of Directors for the Certification Counsel for Professional Dog Trainers (CCPDT).

Nicole also co-instructs (with Dana!) the Shelter Behavior Rotation for the University of Pennsylvania’s Matthew Ryan School of Veterinary Medicine, is a sought-after speaker both nationally and internationally, and is working on her first dog training book.

In her spare time, Nicole loves to travel, and has successfully meshed vacations and animal behavior through working to rehabilitate wild parrots in Belize and baby elephants in Kenya. Nicole resides on a small farm in the Philadelphia area with her husband and a menagerie that includes an Australian Cattle Dog named Uluru, a Border Collie mix named Porterhouse, two donkeys, four goats and a flock of chickens.